Vrykolakas

The revenant of the modern Greek tradition, recorded in continuous folk practice from the Byzantine period to the twentieth century. The figure was held to be the body of one whose burial was incomplete, whose excommunication was unlifted, or whose nature in life was already approaching the condition: drunkards, suicides, the unbaptised. John Cuthbert Lawson's *Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion* (Cambridge, 1910) is the standard ethnographic record. The figure was said to leave the grave on Saturdays in some islands, knocking at the doors of the living and calling them by name. The countermeasure recorded by Lawson and earlier by Leo Allatius in *De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus* (1645) was disinterment and dismemberment, with the heart in particular pierced or burned.

The figure was not classed with the nereid or the kallikantzaros; the vrykolakas belonged unambiguously to the dead, returned, and was treated by the village priest in conjunction with the householder rather than by ritual specialist. The Greek Orthodox theology of the figure held that excommunication itself preserved the body from decay, and the lifting of the excommunication was the formal counter-rite for the apparent return.